Building more detail in less house

May 27, 2005|By Kimberly Blanton, The Boston Globe

If you don't know why you despise McMansions, architect and author Sarah Susanka can tell you.

These houses, which have popped like dandelions in suburbia in the past decade, are "massive storage containers for people." Their oversized rooms with their stone floors have "the acoustics of a parking garage," she wrote in her best-selling first book, "The Not So Big House" ($35, Taunton Press). McMansions, whose central purpose seems to be the acquisition of square footage, are "so big with so little soul."

Susanka is in the vanguard of a movement to return to houses that feel like home, with creature comforts bathed in light, nooks and crannies for displaying our objets d'art and painstaking detail built-in, whether a bookshelf, bay window or gracefully arched ceiling. To pay for these extras, Susanka recommends people build or buy a house that is one-third the space they think they need.

After more than five years of sharply rising real estate prices, her concepts may appeal to budget-constrained home buyers. One of Susanka's goals is to reconcile homeowners' "dreams with real budgets," a concept she continues to explore in her latest book "Home by Design: Transforming Your House into Home" ($35, Taunton Press).

Her ideas can be radical. For example, she suggests the way to shrink the house is to scrap the formal living and dining rooms, a staple of the family home. We never use them, she said in a recent interview from her North Carolina home. She often notices, when visiting someone's home, that she is first led into the living room.

"We'd stand and talk, and as soon as they decided I was a nice person, they'd say, 'Let's go into the kitchen.' We're building our living rooms for people we don't want in our houses," said Susanka.

Among the architects worldwide who admire Susanka is Paul Lukez, a young innovator in Somerville, Mass. In his designs, an important component of small is that "the kitchen, breakfast and other rooms all relate to each other."

Lukez transformed an entire house after setting out to design a kitchen extension for Dianne Pearson and Bruce Edwards' Belmont, Mass., home. The couple purchased the World War II-era house after their children had grown up and moved out of the tract house they had owned for years.

The empty nesters moved because they wanted a nicer, though not much bigger, house with more land. "We didn't want a huge house," Pearson said one night as she made tea for guests. "I don't feel comfortable in big spaces."

When they purchased their Tudor-style house five years ago, it had about 2,000 square feet, with three bedrooms on the second floor and a third-floor attic. Lukez added very little space--a 10-foot extension on the back of the house to accommodate an ultramodern kitchen that replaced an "awful" one. The result is rooms linked by a smooth traffic pattern. He relocated the door between the dining room and kitchen from the middle to one side. Upon entering the kitchen, the door's placement naturally sends the traffic around a brown, granite-topped island. A few steps down is an eating area, which opens onto a patio and the yard beyond.

"It's all about bringing the garden inside," Lukez said. In his designs, the rectangles of each room seem to overlap. "It's is about dividing but connecting."

The kitchen is full of stunning detail, made with unique materials by craftsmen. Although some of the custom cherry cabinets were purchased from a manufacturer, a carpenter made others to match while fitting them into odd spaces. An artisanal metalworker and a woodworker fashioned the railing between the kitchen and lower-level eating area. The kitchen's back wall is painted sea green and covered with corrugated glass, which captures the sunlight and, at night, reflects the light from carefully chosen fixtures.

By adding just 10 feet, Lukez's design also allowed more space upstairs. On the second floor are a now-larger bathroom and sewing room; on the third, a cramped space was transformed into a spacious bedroom with an enormous triangular window that matches the Tudor detail on the front of the house. Looking out the window, Pearson said it gives the feeling of "being in a treehouse."

Some architects who design small houses look to Japan. Small homes are traditional there, but extraordinarily high prices for real estate, reached during the 1980s boom, have elevated comfortable living in a small house to an art form. When the Japanese say small, they mean 800- to 1,000-square-foot homes for couples or families with young children.